Our way of life is at risk … from Labour

Sunday Herald
Oct. 02, 2005

OWERPLAY: Iain Macwhirter argues that Labour’s misuse of the Prevention of Terrorism Act and their unhealthy obsession with security suggest a drive that may end with the denial of freedoms that we have long taken for granted

No, you really couldn’t have made it up. An aged Labour stalwart, who escaped from Nazi Germany, is roughed up by Mosley-ite thugs – sorry, “Labour stewards” – and ejected from the Brighton conference because he heckled Jack Straw over the war in Iraq. Walter Wolfgang is then threatened with prosecution under the Prevention of Terrorism Act when he tries to return.

This episode spoke so eloquently about how New Labour have stifled debate and mobilised the law against free speech that it seemed too good to be true. Even as I watched, I could scarcely believe my eyes. Was this fiction or fact? Had I stumbled into a political thriller? A Rory Bremner sketch?

Labour are profoundly embarrassed by the whole episode and rightly so. They know how damaging this image was and is, and they are truly sorry for what has happened. Everyone from Tony Blair down has apologised so profusely that it has become something of an embarrassment – even to poor old Wolfgang, who has agreed to put the matter behind him.

But I’m afraid we can’t just leave it there. It says too much about the political culture we are living in: about the breakdown of solidarity; the deracination of politics; the collapse of dissent and the invasion of the law into historic freedoms. But first of all, it tells us that Labour have lost the plot.

Those great Labour figures of the past that Tony Blair referred to in his speech – the Kinnocks, Williams, Foots – were able to take a bit of heckling in their stride. In fact, they welcomed it as a way of showing off their rhetorical skills and their command of the arguments. Nor did Labour leaders of the past duck the big issues at conference. Iraq is the greatest issue in modern British politics; it was a disgrace that there was no debate on the war at this conference.

But it took an 82-year-old man to challenge conference control-freakery. Where were the rest of the Labour delegates? The thrusting young radicals? Why, when Wolfgang was being manhandled by Labour’s heavies, didn’t someone raise an outcry on the floor? Wolfgang has been a conspicuous presence at Labour conferences for longer than most of them have been alive. Anyone could see he wasn’t a terrorist.

The lack of collective response to this minor injustice showed just how far Labour’s own solidarity has been corroded by party discipline. But Wolfgang’s defenestration is not just the abiding image of this Labour conference season. It also serves as a metaphor for what the so-called war on terror is doing to British society.

What better way of illustrating the encroachment of criminal law into essential freedoms than Labour’s new laws on terrorism being thrown at an octogenarian dissenter at a party conference? There was initially some doubt about whether the police who threatened Wolfgang under the Terrorism Act were entirely serious. They were.

It’s by no means the first time that the catch-all section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 has been used by police against legitimate public protests. It is frequently used, according to legal watchdog Liberty, against peaceful protesters outside military bases, against animal rights activists and even squatters. On BBC’s Question Time from Brighton on Thursday, Labour activists cited numerous incidents at this conference in which people were being regarded as a security risk because they wore T-shirts opposing the war. Such declarations can apparently be interpreted as an incitement or provocation under section 44.

Former Grampian Police chief Ian Oliver said on BBC Scotland that he is worried the police are being given too many new powers that are too vague and general. If chief constables are becoming worried about a police state, then I think we all should be.

The security obsession has become risible. Labour delegates were being denied access to the Brighton conference if they were caught in possession of a bag of boiled sweets. But it isn’t a joke. This is how a police state begins. If Labour tolerate this, everyone’s freedom will be next.

Were they joking when armed police shot the innocent and unarmed Brazilian electrician in Stockwell tube station? The killing of Jean Charles de Menezes was an isolated incident too, unfortunate, everyone is deeply sorry … but there’s a war on, you know. It may seem extreme to bracket over zealous crowd control in Brighton with the accidental death of a mistaken terrorist. But in the brutal manhandling of Walter Wolfgang there was a disturbing echo of shoot on sight. A message has gone out from the very top that those charged with enforcing the law are to put security above tolerance at all times. Hardly surprising then if the heavies start putting it about a bit.

Labour have traditionally provided the dissent in our political system, the antidote to the powerful state. Now Labour have joined the great march to the right, there is nobody left to blow the whistle. All those defenders of civil liberties and human rights in the 1980s, including Patricia Hewitt, Charles Clarke and Harriet Harman, are now apologists for the new authoritarianism. The times they are a-changin’.

Imagine if this had been a Tory war and an aged activist had been turfed out of a speech by a Tory minister. There would have been an outcry. Labour spokespeople would have been falling over themselves to condemn the use of anti-terrorism laws almost as strongly as they would have condemned the illegal war in Iraq.

The truth is that we have no political opposition to speak of any more in Britain. The Liberal Democrats are too small and incoherent at present. The Tories have signally failed to perform the first duty of an opposition, which is to hold the government to account. Their leader’s decision to sign up for the Iraq war effectively gagged them.

Instead of an effective challenge to New Labour, what we will see at the Tory conference is a beauty contest of the has-beens, the never-weres and the God-help-us-if-they-ever-ares. They all seem to be trying to ape Tony Blair. Kenneth Clarke may be the best of the bunch, but even he is tarnished by his tobacco salesmanship and equivocations about Europe. He talks well about freedom and civil liberties – though he showed less enthusiasm for human rights when he was Margaret Thatcher’s Home Secretary in the 1980s.

Next month, the government will introduce more anti-terrorism legislation. Soon it could be illegal to speak in favour of Palestinian suicide bombers or Chechen guerrillas. The police could be allowed to incarcerate terrorist suspects for three months without charge. British citizens may be forced to carry identity cards, which even Winston Churchill regarded as instruments of a police state. Terrorist suspects can already be placed under house arrest on the say-so of the Home Secretary. Evidence gleaned under torture could soon be admissible in British courts.

I don’t want to be alarmist. Really. We are still a parliamentary democracy, and this is still a relatively free society, provided you are white and middle class. But it might not be for very much longer. This is a crucial moment in history when civil liberties, taken for granted for centuries, are under threat.

The forces of liberty are ill-matched to the task of defending them. Our democratic structures have ossified. They are brittle and old, like Walter Wolfgang’s limbs. It won’t take much to break them.